The original Crucial Gizmo was released several years ago, and though still a very useful device, has been somewhat outclassed in both size and speed by more recent alternatives. Never a company happy to be second best, Crucial has revamped their pen drive into a sleeker, smaller footprint and has added a dual channel memory controller for much improved performance.
Inside the box you get the pen drive itself, a lanyard wrist-strap and a disk containing drivers for older operating systems as well as security software should you want to encrypt your data. The drive itself measures 20mm wide, 68mm long and around 8mm deep. This makes it one of the smallest drives in the market, allowing you to plug it into fairly restrictively-spaced USB ports with ease. This is an important upgrade over the original Gizmo, as we previously found you had to remove adjacent devices to plug it in.
As with the OCZ Rally drive, the Gizmo Overdrive uses a dual channel memory controller. This increases the potential performance by a theoretical factor of two over traditional drives – which will certainly be of benefit to those who move a lot of large files.
As with all pen drives we have used, the Gizmo requires no drivers for use on a Windows XP system. Simply plug the drive into a free USB port and it will be recognised as a new volume. You can then drag and drop files in exactly the same manner as you would with a hard drive. If you required additional security for your data, Crucial bundles “PortableVault” software, which allows 256 bit encryption and password protection. The software is simple and easy to use, and offers superior security to an alternative like password-protected ZIP files.
